Accelerating Credit Decisions – Case Study

Santiago Tommasi:

As she said, my name is Santiago Tommasi. I am a credit manager in Mosaic. We are going to talk today about the project, the implementation project of CDA, which is a credit decision accelerator, which is a tool provided by HighRadius. Actually, a few months ago, we were talking with HighRadius about what to talk about and they asked me to explain what happened in our company when we implemented CDA and probably there are two reasons why they asked me this, number one because there weren’t any other volunteers to speak up. Now, just kidding, It was a success story for us. We achieved their goals we wanted to achieve before implementing the system. At the same time, it probably takes away from credit people. If we have any credit people that, by the way, we’d like to ask who is here in the credit department or you are in the cash app credit department. We have some credit folks here. And are you familiar with this SAP here? Good. That’s the second question I have. So number two was because we abolished the takeaways, we changed the way we used to do business on credit in Mosaic. Why? Because we took the advantage of implementing this tool not only to have more efficiencies from the system standpoint but also to change the mindset, to change the risk management approach within the company and go into explaining about that. But this is the agenda, we’re going to talk about all these in some shapes.

Santiago Tommasi:

Well, I’m going to present all the challenges we found and why we were looking for efficiencies there. But then what we do is finally we implement this idea. So, you know, the end of the movie so you can go to a party now. If you want. Good about the mosaic to give your perspective about the company. So this company was founded as a result of immersion between a public company in Canada of the IMC dedicated to their potash production and Cargill fertilizer, which is, you know, which is the biggest agriculture company in the world in say set about seven were about $7.5B in 2017, although last year we were over eight million. Something important to highlight here that most of the sales are done in credit terms. So we do have to manage the credit terms to support these sales, which is big numbers. And we start talking about millions and 2 million cases is just a few like a little credit limit and you see a lot of money. But we talked like and we lost perspective about the numbers? We kind of do it with about 15 thousand employees. We have operations in several countries such as the US, Ghana, Brazil, China, India, Saudi Arabia, Peru. Also, we export to about 40 countries, which is basically our export international assets business mainly here from the US. But we also export from Brazil. So you can see it here. Sorry about this. Does it work on the screen? This is a product we commercialize. Basically, this is how fertilizer looks like and this is basically the commodity business. So being in the commodity business, you have to be very competitive in cost. Thus, the initiative that the company took probably five or six years ago was about being leaders in cost. That drives us to the CDA because the ultimate goal of CDA was cost-reduction and efficiency. So moving on. By the way, this is just our mining which is open, open mines. And the potash is done on the underground for like three thousand feet underground mines that are massive investments. This is a fluke. The footprint, as I said before, those are the countries where we do have operations, but we also support sales to all the Americas, some countries in Asia, part of Africa as well.

Santiago Tommasi:

So the open AR, the portfolio profile before implementing this project. It was before talking about that, we decided because of budget restrictions to make focus, we’d see the only two more materials. Sure enough that in North America and Brazil. So we left for a second phase. The rest of the sugar deficit, which didn’t happen yet, of course, for the same reasons. So we have coverage for about 90% of our sales, our company between North America and Brazil, including exports. So we have only 1200 customers in North America. A big number, but only just a few numbers of customers. Well, in Brazil, we had about 5 thousand when we initiated the project. But at the end of the project, we ended up having like eight something active customers. It was so dynamic in Brazil, that in six months everything changed and we had more customers.

So we ended up having almost double the number of active customers. So their credit process was 100% manual and this was part of the key challenges where everything was done by excel files, tracking files and emails to approve the credit lines, etc. Also, as part of the good policy, we used to have five fourths almost up to three years ago. We have a lot of layers of approval for every single credit limit depending on the credit line. We were looking for up to 70 in North America and up to 10 different approvals in Brazil. This costs a lot of time to follow up because the upper you go in the organization. Well, these guys are easier to fly and traveling or whatever, but that is not the priority to talk about. So that was another challenge we had. We follow this structure for the credit department, we were six people here in North America, while in Brazil we had eight.

So when we started with this, I’d be shy about changing the way of doing great, and when we wanted to drive efficiency in the department, we evaluated different alternatives. We evaluated different systems. We ended up, as I said earlier, going ahead with the CDA with HighRadius. And that’s why I’m talking here to you guys. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here. So we put together a cross-functional team in order to move on with this brochure widget, which was basically the great department I.T. But we also involved other departments, internal audits. We are a public company. So internal controls, internal audit was important there as well. I think the aim of the commercial department, that they ended up being part of that outflow. Some of the key challenges we had when we decided what to do, how and why we wanted to do it with HighRadius were about, for example, pulling information from different sources we wanted.

The idea was to have a global approach. We wanted to have the capability to pull information from somebody from external third party agencies, Cirrus in Brazil to Credit Safe here in North America, which is one of the best reporting agencies here, and different languages, different currencies that they were needed to be successful with the implementation of these policies, to have the capability to operate with them. Then to have what we call here multilayered credit approval, which was basically to have everything in SAP, all the approvals in SAP and to have the delegation of authority develop in SAP. This is a challenge we have. The lack of visibility relates to knowing where you are. Well, if you are a great manager, know how many reviews you have, how many alerts or what your team is doing on set up priority fees, the unnecessary.

Santiago Tommasi:

Credit management, we found ourselves measuring in different ways the way we evaluated the customer. So as I said earlier, we have spreadsheets and analysis and create entities here in Brazil. So what? For me, it wasn’t a risk, a risky account probably for someone else in the department or the embassy was at risk. So there were different mindsets and we wanted to have a unique kind of measuring the customers. And that’s what I’m going to show you in the next two slides.

And then scalability, I think, is the right pronunciation, not sure about that. It’s about the capability of performing different functions. So we wanted not only to have CDA to do approvals in SAP but also to be the only or the main contact apparently we have a system with SAP. We developed similar workflows in order to make our life easier in the credit department. I’m going to talk in two slides about that. So the drivers, as mentioned earlier, cost savings will so far be the big driver. Without that, we wouldn’t have any project to talk about. They make you focus on their high-risk accounts. So how do you determine what is a high-risk account? Being in compliance with credit policy. So it meant that we wanted to shut some credit policies in order to be more efficient, but keep the compliance which is being put up for a public company and improved visibility about getting who has to approve that credit limit? where it is sitting right now? we have a lot of information that at the time used to be handled by excel spreadsheets. We wanted to have everything integrated within SAP and not in the third parties. Also, say mission or area of reducing approved layers. We didn’t want to have 7 approval for every single credit limit that was over one or two million euros or whatever that number was in North America.

We wanted to have efficiency there being a real-time information exchange, I said that we have. We wanted to have interfaces, you know, to interact with different parties, to pull information from external sources. We know the solution. So on the right side of the screen, you have what we said at the time the future state. It is where we made the difference because we only need it for the future state here. But when they talk about pulling information from different sources, we also have a system that is used by the sales force and we have probably 250 sales account managers that they use to provide information to our credit department by email. So now we centralized all these inflows by the interface and the system select certain information that is part of that credit information in order to be of our scoring.

Santiago Tommasi:

So we saved a lot of time there and we were also granted the integrity to have everything within our system. We also wanted to have different scoring models, not to have only one or two or two. Because we have a variety of customers and are different in different markets. Although what we sell looks like it, we sell only to the product that we sell a little more than two products. There are different markets, for example, in Brazil, we don’t treat farmers the same way we treat farmers. There is a different reason that different information is provided by the cost of our available in the market and we capture these in different scoring models. Same in North America, not the same to sell to a farmer than to sell to a cooperative or to sell to an industry such as Cargill – that is our customer by the way. We also wanted to have this system with their internal data transmission, with their parties and with internal systems and security created the approval process. I talk about that already. And there was at least – that we are going to see now – on this call model, there is not like rocket science, is the traditional information. Most of the scoring like tools or rules taken into consideration is just pulling information.

External internal, putting this together, saying buy albums and assign values and how you end up having that score. So, basically, the system allows us to have financial information from the customer to enter these to view that as part of the recording. The same with credit reports and alerts. Getting an alert from the credit agency or the score from the credit agency is part of the recording where we are conceding data collection A.S.A.P. impairment in internet history – the information was there. So we wanted to convert these to something that brings value to us as part of the scoring. And then for international sales, we also make high focus on the country risk factors because this is one of the important parts of the risk when you are selling to a different country and also you were talking before about Argentina. So a few years ago, selling to Argentina used to be a challenge – challenging in order to get their money back. And that’s an example. So it is not the same to sell the same product to probably the same company in Argentina or Venezuela than sitting in France, right. So this is kept over there. The result of the scoring is that we ended up having typical risk classification from a fun being a very low-risk gang, and if high risk and of course the riskier the customer ease, the credit department has to do differently to perform different activities or due diligence in order to mitigate that risk. But this is beside the system. The point here is, remember when I was talking about a different mindset – different people analyzing their customers and having a different mindset about the risk that the customer was involved in. So that was great progress because we started talking about risk class. So now every class in Brazil is exactly the same term of risk that it is here.

Santiago Tommasi:

So approvals, great comedy, but that allows us comedy. It said that we know where we have that reason and we know we have one rule to measure all the customers. So stunned that I say show and this is bloody when I was talking about changing the approach to risk management and this is probably the most challenging thing we had to discuss internally. We changed our approach from approving and defining the approvals for a credit limit based only on the credit limit. From now on, the idea was to have different approval flows within the system in order to approve based on the risk class. So we are not having the same approach. See, the customers say low risk down. If it’s a high risk. We also developed the auto review concept. So for existing customers, we develop the rule in the CDA to allow us to run the score in the seating. Brassy scoring automatically was a year before. Then the credit limit expires and if the credit limit is under a certain number that we defined so the credit limit is auto approve the credit, create anything great, the department doesn’t do anything. Again, talking about exceeding credit limits. Now if they think a customer that was under a certain number, we’ll auto review.

The credit limit was higher to that limit that we priest published. So now the credit that I have to put the house song on to work on that and depending on the credit limit can be approved by the credit analyst or the senior credit manager to approve us for the low-risk account just as the maximum number of approvals versus seven. So that’s a great challenge because my predecessor wasn’t in the conflict about approving a 100 million dollar account for a low-risk account because it used to be approved by this year’s CEO and six other people before.

So that they will look challenging and are really, really where we’ve made the difference in the order in terms of efficiency. And the same with the rest of the Category C or F.. So if you said your F, meaning how risk, of course, there is an auto review and then we have different the ratio of authority. We don’t have this. They either have the same approval limit here, right here. So we have also commercial teams to senior leaders in a commercial team depending on their credit limit. What we are missing here is a credit limit. So when we have different limits for each category, there are high numbers.

If a different logic at the end of the book, I’m going to choose large about that. But we don’t have the location of the Asia authorities only for approving grade limits. And we have another flow in Brazil that is called say. So are you familiar with this? Okay, good.

Santiago Tommasi:

Okay. Moving on. And I know that you are ready for a party. So I would try to be faster. This is exactly the same approach, but for Russia. So we have way more approvals in Brazil. But anyways, nothing comparing the 10 that we used to have a similar scheme. Different the oil, a different flow. So we have different flows from Brazil versus North America and different limits. But we can handle these limits. If we do a change in the great policy, we can adjust these easily at the user level. We don’t need I.T. support. Those are the different workflows. Remember that they said that this tool wasn’t only related to a credit limit, that Brewer was also to make our life easier, and of course to make efficiencies and to save money. So we have been talking about the credit limit approval. But for December, we have the credit review workflow, which is triggered automatically by the system.

If one of the three following conditions happens, one is you have to renew their credit limit by our policy. We need to renew the credit limit within 15 months. So we have that information in this AP and that three years, 30 days before here and 60, I think in Brazil triggers a great review workflow to lead the credit that there is no that he or she has to work with their credit limit approval with a credit limit renewal has time enough to pull financial information from the customers, to do the analysis, to run the scoring and to approve it or work on the approval. There are two other conditions. One is over the limit – if for any reason happens that opening a year. So what is the credit limit? That sometimes happens. So the credit that I have in there and CDA workflow saying, hey, you have to do something about that, create value. So you need to write reports as we used to, but we used to run a compliance report on it on a weekly basis. Now we have these tools for resolving subordination with the accounts.

We see all this over. Forcing something market, there is another war for there. So I want to be true to provide much detail about these because it gains literally data and people are starting to go to the party, for example, for a man to answer your question, block all of those? No! The only thing that we develop here is instead of going or getting access to the credit cure every 30 minutes, every one hour, all the credit analysts do these routinely. We have warfare. So if there is an order and a credit to him, here you go, I know. So you don’t have to receive an email from customer service because you have this right away. The thing from there is that you can access the credit QR queue. You can release that. They say sort of that in our case in the email. So that all of that could be one million or ten dollars or 100 million with a half delegation of the for 30 days per person.

Santiago Tommasi:

Yeah. Because he has done that functionality that we have for releasing all of those. However, we have Sox control as one of the controls. The next day we review all the sorts of things released manually. And this is one of the controls that we weren’t able to get that read off. And we have others for some of our security. The experiments about a, we do have great insurance, we do have collateral and they expire. So instead of having an expiring file, we have the formation in SAP. And you have a workflow in this to advise you that the insects, 60 days, 90 days, whatever, you have to renew these or you have to do something. So as I said, these make us be more comfortable with the system because we have all the information. And those are in summary, all the benefits of having implemented these. That’s where I’m going to show you that. I’m sure that this is their main tool that we use for CDA. And as I said earlier, lower price languishes with multiple scoring rules.

Another thing electronic filing that they did in derbies is five years ago when I came from Argentina all the way to Minnesota, I was amazed negatively because of the Harrop file cabinet. There were papers everywhere. There were, 5 years ago, three years ago, financial statements, everything. So we took the advantage here to change that old school stuff to electronic. So now we have everything within the system. This gives us the possibility, for example, to allow working remotely because you don’t need to bring paper documents to your house to create the notices. You have everything in the system or something very important. Now for us is a cross backup across that short office so we can take that one thing off their losses or here in North America. We do have standard processes to take advantage of having a credit analyst here to support our team in rescue when the system. If we want to do root in the system, because, again, we have all the information there. We need to do the analysis. We need to hear the information about the case that can be trained to do this. So you have the opportunity to labor resources across Europe.

And they are doing as I said earlier, we actually now provide layers of reporting immunity and spreadsheets, etc. And this is the example of the Dutch war. So does anyone in the room know this tool? They see the A cup. Have you seen this before? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. On. Actually, we talk to Monsanto before moving on. We’d see them. In Brussels, Belgium. So yeah. This is pretty. It looks like an S.A.P. Correct me if it’s SAP or not.

Santiago Tommasi:

To me, it looks like SAP so you can of course us. Most of the functionality has. Is it because of the more information here? This is called the dashboard. So you can customize the view in order to have the information you are looking for. And then I remember when I was talking about cross-functional or supporting other shoulder fees, for example, you can select the giving customer reassigned by hitting this button here. You can read it in some way. I see it with someone next to you there. So if you can see the different workflows that you have here and this is the current viewer that is probably great that I discuss. This is what they have to do today, for example, to take care of these things.

If you were cleaning one of these accounts, you have their record. They got them a record, which is basically like different tabs. And in each of this different information provided there. We are seeing here right now that desk and actions where they create that country different stuff or actions in order, for example, to upload information in the attachment section to update financial information in this section, which, by the way, is the one that is used to to to calculate the scoring securities and insurance on the credit report. This creates safe information that abruptly throws at us a receipt or whatever. And also, you have here on the right side all the tracking of the different workflows that were the trigger and were closed in this case. We are seeing that through our workflow because you see that someone’s three or three-year career clearly leaves it up to our workflow by one person, which is the credit analyst and the final approval looks like he’s A or B account. So there are only two approaches. So you know who approved what? What time of day and also have the functionality to our comments. And of course, the comments stay here forever. Once you enter the information there, you can’t delete it. Any questions? Yes. Thank you.

Speaker 1:

So the approvers used to receive the requests by email or they received it on the SAP?

Santiago Tommasi:

Well, if he’s an exit. Oh, sorry. Too loud here. If it’s an existing customer in their credit limit, a review is through, you’re automatically a certain number of days before you have the expiration of the current credit limit because of the policy. We have this policy for 50 months. So I know in Brasil 60 month in 60 days before the expiration of the current limit, you receive the greater your workflow and you are so great. And I need to talk to the court-martial in order to make sure our review of the basket, in order to make sure that the credit limit is enough or you will need to adjust it lower or increase it. However, we also receive this mosaic online, this tool that we have, an interface that feeds information from the commercial team to the credit team, the commercial team is doing a contract now that that will need an increase in the credit limit. It also comes automatically in three years.

Speaker 1:

And did they receive it by email, or did they go into the SAP?

Santiago Tommasi:

It comes here in notes. So that information triggers their workflow. I know the information you need. It looks like it. These, but in these tough. No. So you have out there their volume, their credit limit request.

Speaker 1:

How do they receive it?

Santiago Tommasi:

The interface between the system. There is no email. Yeah. You got on my team. Yeah. Three times a year. So we do it all the time. Yeah. But I think he likes us to look great. They’ll send us an e-mail and we’ll have a link that’ll take me right where I can see the detail. What we did in the will of the email approval. But I want to go about how the process is triggered by the commercial team. Now when you’re talking about approval. No. That’s the only con we have. The only contract we have in NSA be here and see the ace up the approvals they need to get into SAP again. We are not okay with many approvals and only a few cases. Go to the CFO, for example. Probably five in a year. But every time that this year Ford needs two to approve, that leave limit takes forever because he doesn’t have the past where he’s tried anything on the same stuff. We were talking about the. So proudly wars. So this is the only thing. And we didn’t develop the email approval thing because it was more expensive with her budget than we were in Tokyo. Tokyo approves candidate software. Catherine, I see only a few. And usually, would we do to avoid having a situation like this to plan to work about it, to have something time that we assume that this year for this year, for about that there’d be Patricia, my boss, or the other BP commercial person probably would take one week to come back from trips or whatever and everything one week.

Speaker 2:

I have two questions. So for example if the credit limit required because of the risk needs is more in-depth, where have you documented that. For example, if there is a need to do a financial analysis and the second question is how is the day to day life of a credit analyst in terms of requests or how do they start the day. Do they work with all the dependent things or the system alerts every time when something is required and what about the time when they are not working on requests but maybe another type of analysis?

Santiago Tommasi:

Okay, I will answer that question before. So they do create that and therefore, I think what they do when they get into the system is to get into seeing them. So they come here and they see because here with it. So it’s not the best picture of it. Oh, that’s good to hear about them. You have everything you need here from the credit perspective. Of course, we don’t do all the credit approvals releasing all the other stuff or anything that has to do with the seating here. Most of it, I would say so. Day to day they come here and this year. OK. There is a credit review war for a new one because of this other one. Yeah. I knew that they had to approve these limits. I have been working with these so I knew that they had. But these pop up today so far. Why is a credit review? Because we need to renew the credit limit already. So I know our living situation brings up an issue with the open and open AR etc.. So this is yet I see they do if they say where this is in our living situation. But we are fixing these because we are approving the credit limit.

Leave it to the customer, pay them. What really is your payment will be posted today. Just an example. Just getting to. Double-clicking that customer and then completing their workflow here and their war flow disappears. So it’s key to have these cleared, not to have chunky stuff credit allowed if there is a great deal. And it’s because this guy in great safety is reporting that the customer is filing chapter dealing or whatever. So they could be UCC filing. So or seriously in Brazil, there is a neurotic restriction over there. So the day to day work for the credit analyst is to get into these serious plays, say if you sit here and see what happens if it’s something important. Well, they have just come here. They have to do the new additions if it’s something that is shut. There was a UCC filing here in the year, so just getting their next screen completed their workflow. But we are creating this tool, this dynamic in order to be ready to do what we have to do if there is a risk. And now I don’t know the answer to that question. Now, I forgot the first one that actually.

Speaker 2:

Before you move to the other one actually, is the manager able to see you on the work that they have been doing?

Santiago Tommasi:

I guess see, for example, that everyone can see that these are just heating different, different matters. Here you can see everything across his. So I can see what they are. The other in Brazil, for example. That helps you to kind of estimate that you have to prioritize and to know for a number of how many approvals sitting on their MEP treasurer because he’s driving. So you gotta feel as though you can have different filters here on the current user, which is over here and we can see it and you can see who is carrying water for how long to measure and claim. I mean, claim that police approve this or do that as you have.

Speaker 2:

The other question was if you actually have to document more in-depth or the detailed analysis, what do you do in that?

Santiago Tommasi:

Yeah, well, usually what we do is in D.C. where we have the attachments, we have always when we do the great analysis for customers with financial information or without financial information, we have what we call the write-up. This is a write-up, a certain file in your file or B, the F where we are. Is there the risk in order to lead the approvals? No. Why? We do support or we don’t support a limit and then someone else’s decision depending on the great risk. Also depending on the. And this is not about the system, but what you said earlier, we can implement credit insurance or have collateral in order to mitigate that risk. And that’s addressed there in the write-up.

So the approvals in general, depending on who that approver is, who the customer is, they are able to come here to read. They credit that and write up. I wish I knew about it because it’s part of his show, too. However, most of the time there is some comment that we introduce here when we approve. So what we try to enter here is information is just calorie information. Why do we believe that we have to approve these or not? Usually, it is approved. Yes. No is it’s pretty easy. You have just didn’t had this standard week VK And one which is an SAP. We don’t, but you can. You have access to all the transactions that are standing as SAP. However, if you have a block out of the workflow like this, when you have this button here, you hit their eye, bringing you to see me in a transaction to the standard way. It’s not standard. It looks like. No, no. They go to the standard section. But you have different functionality.

Because now we have like two monitors since we implemented these. We have two monitors. And probably you guys in Brazil you want to monitor so you can teach from one to the other. Okay. No, I was asking because my team in Brazil doesn’t want to. Yeah. So you guys have, for example, one that transaction here, the other here or the financial statement here and are working with this other stuff in the other scheme, drive, copy and paste and everything. So this is great. So what they usually do. They have sudden information here. They open the. They see here in this town, they create information. The issue with it and the other screen, they have the standard transaction instead of low in there too that where they say. The way it is because most of the credit analysts have been there for many years and this the way they want to do it. But yeah. But it’s good that you have two choices. The whole school year is in 14 years using SAP one way. So we know that the time travel. Yes, that’s that’s that’s. So any question. I promise. Two more minutes are three more minutes.

Speaker 3:

What percentage did you manage to reach automatic approval?

Santiago Tommasi:

One minute, please. I have this right here. So I’m going to the end to just one comment about these issues. They appreciate they appreciate it and take that long. When we’ve made the decision that we were going to do CDA, it took only six months from the kick-off on the blueprint until the goal of life was hyper clear. So it wasn’t that bad? I actually worked pretty well. We have a person from HighRadius coming to our office in Minnesota for one month during the blueprint coming to their conferences with Brazil. We have big with the understanding there, which helped a lot. And then another person came during your 80s. You said to me on the test, which also helps a lot to the aspiration to fix issues because our overseas show that we didn’t have any sort of surprise any big surprise when goal life.

So, I mean, we have these issues, but they’re worried that if I before going in life and then we’ll fix it with the time. Another thing is that we decided for some reason to implement first in North America.

And one month later in Brazil. You haven’t any idea why. Complexity. So we say, well, let’s go with the easiest one first, see how how it works in two weeks, three weeks. And we can use that knowledge. After all, we live and what we love in North America to have more information when we go to live in Brazil, which is way more complex. Again, it is, I think, customer versus twelve candidate cola that escalated. Sure. As far as a transaction, a lot of characteristics that are developed for Russia. So that’s why we do this. And lastly, how will the presentation was put together by HighRadius? So that’s why they said before HighRadius, after her HighRadius, I was there before the project that after the project, we as you see, we reduced dramatically the number of approved layers. This average to approve a credit limit dropped from nine to four, which is basically because we got rid of people that we didn’t go into having the approval flow. And that’s your answer, 15 % below are in between. Brazil and North America have approved automatically and we are targeting low risk, low credit limits for us, which is better because we don’t have to do anything with these accounts.

Santiago Tommasi:

This is only about credit limits. Yeah. Yeah. Now, all of this we have this done that functionality. So if one of their parameters is not called. The order they go through the queue by the automatic critic controlling recipe, whether they invest any money, this is done there. And lastly, and this is probably the sad part, is that we way the US does FDA in each year. And this is when you talk about cost reductions and efficiencies. Most of the time to be with people when used to retire. In North America. So they have to let go anywhere in North America.

So ready for a party tonight? I think I think people are complaining about the core of this very core here, but trust me, I’m leaving in Minnesota. That’s called a winner. Here we have it, buddy, it’s 38 degrees today here in Minnesota’s 12th grade. Okay guys, thank you so much and show that party tonight. Thank you!